Any business that accepts cash as a form of payment is subject to several dangers and delays. Even though many businesses accept cash payments from its customers, very few businesses operate with cash outside of that context. Thus, businesses deposit the received cash with a financial institution (e.g., a bank) so that the money becomes available for use in electronic commerce, payroll, etc. To make a deposit, a business must first transport the cash to a financial institution. For efficiency, the business often stores received cash until a sufficiently large amount has been accumulated. And to deposit the cash, an employee must physically carry the cash from the business to the financial institution for deposit, making that person a potential target for crime. Similarly, business employees often also make regular trips to the financial institution to withdraw cash in order to ensure an adequate supply of cash to make change for the purchases. Again, the person physically carrying the cash from the financial institution to the business may also be at risk. These procedures are inconvenient because businesses consume valuable resources in making trips to the financial institution, the cash and the person transporting the cash are at an increased risk during these trips, cash stored at the business is generally an inaccessible asset until it is deposited in the business's financial account and becomes available for electronic exchanges, cash stored at the business is relatively insecure as compared to deposited money, and the business owner may be forced to wait for days to have the revenue generated by cash payments reflected in their accounts.
While some automated teller machines (ATMs) can accept cash deposits, ATMs are not always available in retail environments. Deposits and withdrawals to ATMs outside of the retail environment pose the same problems noted above with regard to deposits and withdrawals at financial institutions. Even when such machines are located within a business, they are not practical for use for deposits and withdrawals for the business owner. The business owner cannot use it to deposit payments and withdraw change for every transaction because the ATMs require entry of account information (e.g., swiping of a debit card and entry of a pin number) for each transaction, ATMs may not accept or pay out small denominations required for transactions (e.g., only accepts or pays out amounts in $5 or more increments), and ATMs are often located far from where the transaction occurs (e.g., cash registers may not be located near the ATMs).
ATMs are also inconvenient for bulk deposits. ATMs are not equipped to rapidly accept large amounts of cash, so the transaction may take a long time for the ATM to physically accept the cash being deposited. Additionally, there is often only a single ATM at a location, so large deposits or withdrawals may not be possible if the ATM cash vault does not have room to accept the full deposit or does not have enough cash to complete the requested withdrawal.
Furthermore, cash payments are typically mediated in retail environments through cash management systems (e.g. traditional cash registers, point of sale (POS) systems, self-checkout systems) that enable users to record sales and store received cash payments. Such systems, however, are not connected to retailers' financial accounts and thus do not have any way of making the revenue generated by cash payments accessible to the business for electronic commerce.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and processes that directly deposit the revenue generated by physical currency payments as soon as they are made. It is also desirable to provide systems and processes that reuse received currency to make change and to reflect such reuse in the business' financial account.